


A Freshman Generation of Degenerate Beauty Queens

by ConvenientAlias



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coffee, Dark Comedy, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 02:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20302252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias
Summary: Jughead says Betty has a secret dark side.But in Toni's opinion, really, she seems perfectly nice.





	A Freshman Generation of Degenerate Beauty Queens

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fortunas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortunas/gifts).

“Do you miss going to Riverdale High?” Toni asked.

Jughead laughed. “No, not really. It was kind of a fucking nightmare.”

“Seriously?” Toni cocked her head. “Riverdale High, a nightmare? Kind of looks like an upper-class, preppy kind of place. You’d really rather be in Southside? Land of jingle-jangle and…”

“And Serpents. People I can trust. People who I know what’s going on in their heads,” Jughead said firmly. “In Riverdale, you never really know what’s going on with anyone. There’s like… a secret dark side to everybody there. It’s dangerous.” He sighed. “Actually…”

“Actually what?” Toni asked, when it seemed he wouldn’t be going on.

“Maybe I’m kind of biased.” He chewed his lip. “…there was this girl I really liked. We were even going out for a while. She seemed like she had it all together. And she was really nice. She seemed completely perfect. But, like I said. There was this dark side to her. I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did.”

“So…?”

“Long story short, we aren’t together anymore,” Jughead said. “Anyways, let’s not talk about my problems! Got any new ideas for stories?”

It didn’t come up again until a week later. Toni came back to the office to find a blonde girl with a perfect ponytail and a pastel pink sweater perched on Jughead’s desk next to two cups of coffee. When she saw Toni, she hopped off the desk. “Oh! Hi. Is this the office for the school newspaper?”

“Yeah. And you are?” (Clearly not from around here, for one.)

“My name’s Betty. Betty Cooper.” Her handshake was perfect too; just the kind of handshake you imagined people taught at leadership seminars, yet not too hard to remain feminine. She smiled brightly. “I’m Jughead’s friend. Is he going to be back soon?”

A muffled gasp and a thump sounded behind them. Toni turned to see Jughead staring with his eyes wide open and a binder lying on the floor with paper sprawling out of it.

“Jughead?” Toni asked.

Betty was already walking past her. While Jughead stood frozen, she gathered up his papers and gently put them back into the binder, which she then placed, still gently, back in his hands. She squeezed his shoulder. “Hi, Juggie. Sorry, I knew I might surprise you by coming over here. We didn’t really leave things in a good place, but I was hoping we could still be friends.” When Jughead said nothing, she asked, “Is that okay?”

Finally Jughead forced a smile. “Yeah, Betty, that’s fine. Toni, this is Betty. She’s my ex-girlfriend.”

Oh.

* * *

Jughead never explained exactly how his relationship with Betty imploded. He told Toni she shouldn’t be too leery of Betty—“she’s perfect,” he said, “everyone loves her”—which completely contradicted his earlier statements and left her feeling kind of confused. It wouldn’t have mattered very much, except Betty kept on coming around, which made Toni feel she ought to have some sort of an opinion of her, but she couldn’t make up her mind.

Sometimes when she leaned over Jughead to look at something Jughead was writing (always interfering, even though she certainly wasn’t part of the Southside newspaper club and according to Jughead had her own newspaper to write), there was something possessive about her posture, and Toni could see why Jughead would be creeped out. And when she interrogated Jughead about whether Jughead had gotten too involved with the Serpents, Toni could feel some of that distaste as well.

But other times she was surprisingly sweet. The second time she came to visit, she had brought three coffees instead of two—one for herself, one for Jughead, and one for Toni. And it was Toni’s favorite, a mocha latte. “How did you know? Did Jughead tell you?”

Betty smiled. “I can just tell that about people sometimes. What they like.”

Was it just Toni, or was she standing a little closer than she needed to be? And she ogled Toni swallowing the coffee so avidly that Toni wondered for a second if the coffee was poisoned.

…she’d clearly caught paranoia from Jughead. It had to be nothing.

But then, when she licked her lips to get the last traces of mocha off them, she saw Betty mirroring the action, licking her own pink-glossed lips, and oh. _Oh_.

“Is Betty bisexual?” she asked Jughead later.

Jughead looked at her warily. “That’s not really for me to tell you. Why, are you interested?”

“Maybe.” Toni crossed her arms. “I mean, she’s a little more tight-laced than I usually like them…” For some reason Jughead huffed at this. “…but she seems nice. And she’s definitely hot.”

“I would not recommend it.”

“It? You mean her? You wouldn’t _recommend her_?” Sometimes Jughead could be so objectifying. In every man, Toni thought, there slumbered a secret misogynist.

Jughead shrugged defensively. “I told you, she’s creepy. Before we broke up, I discovered she’d been making these dolls that looked like me and my friends. She’d been painting Barbies and dressing them up to look like us. Mine had black hair and a beanie and everything. No Serpent jacket, of course, not back then. When I asked her about it, she said it made her feel safe. So I thought maybe she felt safer having us around us, even doll versions. But then she said she liked feeling like we were all within her grasp and wouldn’t leave her, and she could keep us all safe. It was… weird.”

“So she wanted to keep you all safe. She has anxiety, it’s not her fault if she has weird coping mechanisms. Anyways, you probably shouldn’t have told me that. Is that why you guys broke up?”

Jughead closed his eyes. “I’m not even going to get into why we broke up. Suffice it to say, it was a shit-show! I don’t want to talk about it.”

Toni couldn’t get anything really incriminating about Betty out of him, and decided it was probably just Jughead being Jughead. An overdramatic dork. There was nothing really wrong with Betty. Really she was very nice.

So when Betty asked her if she wanted to come over for a sleepover—“my parents are out of town for the weekend, and I guess I just feel kind of nervous staying in the house alone”—she accepted.

Time to see if Miss Straitlaced could follow through on the teasing.

* * *

“I’m so sorry about the mess,” Betty said when she let Toni in.

The place was immaculate.

“Really, I tried my best to clean. Well. I made lemonade? If you like drinking things other than coffee…” She licked her lips.

Toni smiled. “I like drinking, and eating, all kinds of things.”

“Good to know!” Betty tittered and shut the door behind Toni. “Let me show you around a bit. This is the foyer—well, obviously—here’s the living room—that’s the basement, but don’t go down there. The lock’s broken, or we’d keep it locked up, but the stairs are kind of broken too. And it’s even messier than upstairs is. And here’s the kitchen.”

And there was the lemonade.

They each had a full glass, and they chatted about the latest gossip. Toni talked Serpent business, at least as much as wasn’t either illegal or simply private, as much as was suitable for an outsider’s consumption. Betty talked about her own friends, Archie and Veronica and Kevin, people who had come up in Jughead’s stories time and again. Archie’s father had apparently been shot recently, but he’d recovered, only Archie was still worried about finding the shooter… it was all more intriguing than Toni had expected, and by the time they’d finished their lemonade and eaten a little dinner as well, she’d almost forgotten her initial goal in coming here.

It had been a pretty platonic evening, she thought. Maybe this wasn’t really going anywhere, but that was fine. Betty was a good friend, at least.

But now Betty was fiddling with her utensils. Abruptly she stood. “Hey, Toni, do you mind if I go upstairs for a sec? I, uh. I have a surprise for you.”

“Really? Okay. I’ll wait.”

“Great! Just a sec, then.” She hurried off.

Toni paced around a bit. Betty was taking longer than she’d expected. She’d made a few rounds through the living room, kitchen, and hall, when she heard a faint banging noise coming from the basement.

“Betty?”

Betty didn’t respond.

Maybe she should have fetched her, but the banging sounded frantic. Like there was an animal down there. Strengthened by the thought that she didn’t want Betty to have to deal with a rabid raccoon, Toni opened the basement door and headed down.

And at the bottom of the stairs, she saw something horrifying.

There was a cage in the corner of the basement, the kind of cage people used for large dogs. But inside, instead of a dog, there was a person. A blond guy—blond like Betty—with the most pitiful blue eyes. There was a bandage on the corner of his forehead, and there was a strip of duct tape over his mouth, and more duct tape binding his hands together.

When he saw Toni, he banged against the cage’s bars more frantically. His eyes were pleading.

“Fuck,” Toni said. “Jughead was so fucking right. Just a second.”

“Toni?”

Toni turned to see a figure on the staircase. For a second she didn’t even recognize that it was Betty. It wasn’t dressed like Betty, not in a black miniskirt and—was that a corset?—and a black wig. But yes. Betty it was. You could tell by the perfectly composed expression on her face. There was not an ounce of panic showing in her blue eyes. Blue eyes, like those of the boy in the cage.

He couldn’t be any older than they were.

“What the fuck?”

Betty said, “I’m sorry, Toni. I told you not to go in the basement.”

There was a back door out of the basement. Toni took a last glance at the boy, and she ran for it.

_Fuck_.

* * *

And then there was Betty, perched on her desk on Monday morning. Three coffees, cool as a cucumber. Maybe a little apologetic.

“What the fuck?” Toni said. “What are you doing here?”

“No police showed up at my house,” Betty said. “So I figured I owed you an explanation.”

She should have called them, really. Called 911. But she had an aversion to the police, didn’t trust them—especially not the new guy, the one that replaced Sheriff Keller. And the thought of Betty in jail… she hadn’t been able to make herself do it.

“Did you kill that guy after I left?” she asked.

“No. Of course not. He’s—it’s a temporary situation. I can explain everything.”

“It better be a hell of an explanation.”

“His name is Chic. He’s not a good guy,” Betty said. “A while back, he came to our house pretending to be my long-lost brother. My mom fell for it, my sister fell for it. But I didn’t. I found out he was a fake. So. But we couldn’t just kick him out.”

“I feel like you really could have.”

“Mom was too attached. She said if we let him back on the streets, he might OD like my real brother did. So we’re keeping him until we can figure out what to do with him. I know it looks kind of weird…”

“Yeah,” Toni said flatly. “Yeah, it does.”

“…but things just get like that sometimes,” Betty said. “It’s Riverdale.”

She looked Toni in the eyes, and damn. She looked so fucking sincere. How could Toni tell her this was all completely crazy? She didn’t know Riverdale, after all. Jughead had always told her things were different there.

“I wanted that night to go so differently,” Betty said softly. “You saw, I got all dressed up for you.” She leaned close to Toni, lips close at her ear. “Give me a second chance, and I’ll show you. I’m not what you think I am.”

They were kissing when Jughead showed up and dropped his binder all over again. Betty flashed him a smile. “Hey, Jug. Toni and I are dating now.”

And apparently they were.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Lana del Rey's "This is What Makes Us Girls."


End file.
